The measure of the quality of the products is whether they stand the test of time and continue to be a reference regardless of their protagonists and the changing circumstances of the life of a people. Match of the day is the BBC program that every Saturday summarizes the football day since 1964. It is an institution like cricket, the House of Commons, the Wimbledon tournament, the Royal Shakespeare Company or Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.
Gary Lineker, a former player for Barça and for the English national team, in which he scored 48 goals, had been directing the program since 1999 with a contract that allocated him more than one and a half million euros a year. His opinions on football are widely respected for his impartiality and for his own criteria. He is a celebrity who transcends sports, creating currents of opinion favorable or contrary to the current government.
It is accepted as an unquestionable truth that the BBC is the most respectable audiovisual medium because it does not depend on the Government or advertising. It is financed from the license that comes from all Britons who own a television set at home. But its relations with governments are usually tense because the temptation to intervene in the channel’s programming is irrepressible and has occurred at all times since its founding in 1922.
The BBC prides itself on impartiality, but its stars may have their own criteria. In the case of Gary Lineker, it also conveys it through his Twitter account, that he has 8.8 million followers.
His dismissal as the presenter of Match of the Day was not for favoring a team or a player but for having strongly criticized the asylum seeker policy of the Government of Rishi Sunak and his radical interior minister, Suella Braverman, who presented a law to stop the tens of thousands of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel by boat and deport them immediately to Rwanda, in central Africa, in a deplorable operation.
Lineker was dispatched with two forceful tweets. The first was laconic: “My gosh, this is horrible.” A follower questioned him and he answered immediately saying that “it is an immensely cruel policy, which harms the most vulnerable in a language that is not different from that used in Germany in the thirties.”
The most nationalist press and several conservative deputies considered that he was comparing the government to the Nazis and called with all the media trumpeting at their disposal for him to be thrown out of the BBC. Lineker was silent and did not delete the two tweets. Within two days, the corporation decided that he had broken fairness rules and removed him from the program.
In a few hours, a national debate began on freedom of expression and on the right of journalists to speak freely in the alternative media available to them. The BBC itself headed the news with the Lineker case and there was the paradox that many sports commentators from the institution did not want to participate in the Match of the Day last Saturday, a program that became a skeleton of videos without commenting. An embarrassment and contempt for the faithful audience.
The press and other media joined the cause and attacked this type of censorship so dastardly. On Monday, the BBC announced that Gary Lineker would return to direct the show next Saturday. Match point of a footballer turned sports commentator, who has defeated the powerful BBC for a humanitarian cause so despised by the populisms that advance and enter or preside over governments of some liberal democracies with authoritarian touches.
It is not just a sports or journalistic debate. It is the symptom of the unscrupulous attack on what remains of freedom and ethics in Western democratic societies, in which the siren songs of the autocracies reach the institutions that, like the BBC, were and I trust will continue to be the guarantee of a certain impartiality and professionalism.
The underlying issue is the barriers that Europe erects to prevent the arrival of thousands of immigrants fleeing war, persecution, hunger and poverty. The Mediterranean cannot continue to be the cemetery of so many unfortunates and the sea of ??shame for our comforts and supremacist egoisms.
